Milkman

Milkman by Anna Burns won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for fiction and I looked forward to reading it. This is the story of a young girl coming of age in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a political situation that was often discussed in my home when I was growing up in an Irish-Canadian family. It was a difficult read, impossible in fact. I struggled with it for weeks and managed to get halfway through it before throwing in the towel. The protagonist is "Middle Sister" who is a bit of a weird duck with a "maybe-boyfriend". She hangs out with him, runs, reads and studies French. There are numerous relatives who I could not keep straight, brothers, sisters, brothers in law, all assigned numbers or descriptions rather than names. There is a man, known as Milkman, who is a member of the paramilitary and tries to engage Middle Sister in an affair. He stalks her and appears mysteriously when she least expects it. He threatens to kill maybe-boyfriend. The rumour mill goes into overdrive and the community believes that she is in a relationship with this much older married man although she fears him and does her level best to avoid him. An air of vague menace hangs over the book like a dark, suffocating fog. I reached a point where I couldn't read another page. I am kicking myself for not ceding defeat earlier.